Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios has revealed its next table based on Star Wars Rebels.

Due on the week of 27th April for Zen's stable of pinball series - including Pinball FX2, Zen Pinball 2, and Star Wars Pinball - this upcoming table will be based on Disney XD's animated TV series. As such, it will encompass seven missions that include the show's roster of characters and vehicles with fully-animated TIE fighters and the starship Ghost.

Back in 2013 Zen Studios wowed Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton with its Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back table. "It seems ludicrous to say it about a pinball table, but this feels inextricable from the universe, its elements combining into something truly evocative," he wrote in his glowing Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1746007Tue, 31 Mar 2015 01:15:00 +0100Woah Dave! will secretly be free for PS Plus members in April

Minimalist score-chasing platformer Woah Dave! will secretly be free in April for PlayStation Plus subscribers.

What we mean by secretly is that it won't officially be part of next month's Instant Game Collection, so you'll have to search for it separately - a tip unveiled on the PlayStation Blogcast.

This cool freebie was later confirmed for Europe by developer Choice Provisions, the new name of bit.trip studio Gaijin Games.

Lying with my face on a hotel pillow reading IMs from Chris Donlan: 'It's time to go full gonzo.' Donlan is paying me a fee to take the free iPhone app #Fortune around the world with me to do a 2015 Dice Man. It's an app that uses Twitter to generate digital fortune cookies.

Don't get killed, Donlan says, and I sign off.

The maker of the strange #Fortune app is a man called Zach Gage. He makes games and lives in New York City and he only ever wears sandals everywhere. If I were a Male MFA Writer I'd say he's 'a drinking buddy' of mine. I don't feel particularly inclined to treat his game any better. My feelings are that if I savaged this guy's free app he'd still have had a hand in Ridiculous Fishing, one of the most successful iOS games on the store. Maybe he'd be angry on a barstool next to me next time I saw him. Who cares. Maybe this entire article should be about my ambivalent feelings about Zach and our grown up relationship that entails respecting each other's opinions.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1745426Fri, 27 Mar 2015 09:10:00 +0000Metamorphabet: a creepy and beautiful app for children and adults

I was curious to see how Metamorphabet would handle X.

In alphabet books, X is always a pain. Or rather, it's always an X-ray, and since alphabet books are generally aimed at kids - by the time a person has grown up, publishers have despaired of trying to teach them the alphabet - X-rays present something of a problem. In the Peppa Pig alphabet book (I looked, so you can leave your copy on the shelf), the X-ray is a baggage machine at an airport. Interesting trade-off, really. Agreed that nobody wants to think of Peppa Pig maybe following up with a biopsy, but it's strange that the idea she might be smuggling drugs through Nicaragua is clearly not a problem.

In Metamorphabet, an interactive alphabet app, X is an X-ray. But here's the thing: it's an X-ray of a giant X, a letter that, upon closer inspection, appears to have two long bones going off on one diagonal, and a bunch of little bones running down the other. A skeleton stuffed inside a letter: it's wonderfully squirm-inducing to think about that. And then, just as you are thinking about that - wow! - it all gets beautiful. Suddenly, the bones turn into a xylophone. A xylophone you can play, fingers running up and down the scale accompanied by some lovely animation. Metamorphabet is creepy and euphoric by turns. It's Videodrome and Goodnight Moon all squished together. In other words, it's Vectorpark.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1743782Thu, 26 Mar 2015 08:00:00 +0000You've got the touch: How a mobile game gave birth to a human child

Adriaan de Jongh wants to make games that help people fall in love. It's a bold ambition for a bold man. And depending on how you attribute the origins of one's romantic relationship, he may already have succeeded.

The Dutch independent developer first made the scene with his local multiplayer iPad game Fingle in 2011. The novel title by de Jongh's studio Game Oven could best be described as Twister for your fingers. Players would have to keep their digits on moving targets while their opponent would do their best to manoeuvre their fingers around yours. Inevitable players would touch each other.

Sometimes it would do a lot more than that, however. Speaking to de Jongh at GDC, the eccentric developer boasts that Fingle was responsible for Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail's ongoing relationship with software developer Adriel Wallick. "They have a relationship because of Fingle," he tells me at a Dutch local multiplayer party at San Francisco's Cartoon Museum. "They met two years ago at PAX East in Boston, happened to be on the same plane, and when they got back they told me 'hey, you know what? We played Fingle for three hours!' They credit their relationship to me very often." I have since verified this story with Ismail, and it is indeed true.

Competitive side-scrolling racing game SpeedRunners has sold 600K copies on Steam Early Access.

That's quite a lot when one factors in that this simple collaboration between its prototype developer DoubleDutch Games and co-developer/publisher tinyBuild Games has yet to see an official release. tinyBuild noted that players have cumulatively been logging in more than 1m sessions a month.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744637Mon, 23 Mar 2015 23:34:00 +0000Game of Thrones: Episode 3 is due this week on all platforms

Game of Thrones: Episode 3, The Sword in the Darkness, is due this week on PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS and Android, developer Telltale has announced.

PC, Mac, and North American PlayStation users will receive it tomorrow.

Xbox and European PlayStation players will receive it the following day on the 25th.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-23-game-of-thrones-episode-3-is-due-this-week-on-all-platforms
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744582Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:36:00 +0000Telltale hints at more The Walking Dead before season three

Telltale has teased that it has more The Walking Dead content coming before the game's third season.

Last year, the developer released a bonus episode that collected a selection of interwoven stories separate from the series' ongoing narrative which bridged The Walking Dead season one and two.

Titled 400 Days, surviving characters from its narrative then popped up in subsequent episodes.

The upcoming iPhone and Android phone versions of Hearthstone will be compatible with its PC, Mac, iPad and Android tablet counterpart, Blizzard has confirmed.

"It will be your exact same account, so all your cards on tablet or PC will be available on your phone too," said Hearthstone lead designer Eric Dodds in an interview with Gamespot. "When you start a match on a phone, you could be playing someone on another phone, someone on a tablet, on a PC, who knows? It's all one big ecosystem."

One concern with playing Hearthsone on the go is how quickly it will drain a smartphone's battery due to its always online requirement. "One thing we're constantly thinking about is how to make the most of the phone's battery," Dodds said. "I don't know if it uses a lot of data. You have to have a constant connection though. I wouldn't recommend playing it on a train."

Driver Speedboat Paradise, a Hydro Thunder-like racer, is coming to iOS and Android devices in April, Ubisoft has announced.

This aquatic spinoff's premise is as follows: "You're a young, reckless driver trying to make a name for yourself in the ruthless world of underground speedboat racing. But your quest for fame and fortune takes an unexpected turn when you cross paths with legendary cop John Tanner." And to think all this time I didn't even know speedboat racing had a ruthless underground world.

Driver Speedboat Paradise had a soft launch in Australia and New Zealand back in December, but soon it will be available worldwide.

Amid the furore around developer Jeff Minter's claims about Atari and its attempt to block the release of TxK on PC, PlayStation 4 and virtual reality devices, Atari has entered the fitness game market.

The news sparked a vociferous debate about the rights and wrongs of Atari's actions - but that hasn't stopped Atari from today entering the fitness market with a new app for iPhone, iPad, iPad touch and Android devices.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1743924Thu, 19 Mar 2015 16:22:00 +0000PS2 and Xbox 360 versions of Final Fantasy 11 come to an end March 2016

The PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 versions of 13-year-old MMO Final Fantasy 11 finally come to an end next year, Square Enix has announced.

But the PC version will live on.

Final Fantasy 11's final main scenario is called Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, and the first chapter of that will be added to the game in May 2015.

Nintendo today announced it will begin releasing games on mobile phones and tablets, after years of opposition to smart device development.

Company president Satoru Iwata explained Nintendo had received countless business offers from other firms to partner with, before it decided on buddying up with DeNA, a profitable Japanese mobile giant.

Measured against most yardsticks, my 19-month-old baby doesn't really know very much. As I type this, for example, she is crouched in the kitchen, trying to start a conversation with the washing machine. Still, though - and trite as this sounds - every day, I learn a lot from her.

I appreciate that I would say this, but I think I've received the greatest education from watching her play. This is an area that, for some reason, I assumed that I had all figured out before she arrived in my life, and it's an area that it turns out I had a near perfect misunderstanding of. Everything I thought about how kids play turns out to be wrong, if my daughter is anything to go by. It's been amazing to get a truer sense of the way things really work.

My long-held belief, and I have no idea where I picked this up, was that play was much simpler for kids - and in a way a little more honest. Kids played with whatever they had to hand, and they needed no internal architecture to get them going. Rules were for adults, who had to be tricked, or at least bribed, into having fun. As were rituals, achievements, levelling up, the works. Kids, meanwhile, would have a laugh with anything they found lying around. John Ruskin used to play with keys when he was a kid - normal, everyday house keys. Simpler times. (Also worth noting: he grew up to be quite an odd man. Ruskin childhood rearing? Not an unqualified success.)

Cards Against Humanity - the comedic party game about matching funny, offensive cards to funny, offensive prompts - is now available for free online.

Dubbed Cards Against Originality, this web app was actually made by a third party developer named Dawson Whitfield. This is completely legal as the original Cards Against Humanity was made under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone is free to replicate and distribute it so long as it's not for profit.

One of Cards Against Humanity's original developers, Max Temkin, embraces this unofficial app. "I'm glad that our fans have been able to take Cards Against Humanity and remix it into their own original things; that's been a goal since we started working on our project," he told Endgadget. "Cards Against Humanity is obviously a remix of the comedy and games and pop culture that we love, and it's extremely cool to see our thing inspiring people to make stuff."

There are no plans to nerf either Hearthstone's Hunter Hero or the popular Dr. Boom card, according to game director Eric Dodds. The confirmation came as part of an interview with Eurogamer's dedicated Hearthstone sister site MetaBomb at Rezzed, the PC and indie gaming show hosted by Gamer Network.

Dr. Boom is an extremely popular character from the most powerful Legendary class of cards in Hearthstone. Not only does he appear on the board as a solid fighting force in his own right, he also summons a pair of low attack, low health mechanical contraptions which detonate on death to inflict even more damage against random enemy opponents.

It's certainly more powerful than similar cards of an equal resource cost, but it's the breadth of deck archetypes the doctor appears in that seems destined to keep him in rude health.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1742586Fri, 13 Mar 2015 08:52:00 +0000BBC is making a drama about the creation of Grand Theft Auto

The BBC is making a 90-minute live-action drama about the inception of Grand Theft Auto.

Games and tech journalist Guy Cocker called it "a 90-minute feature-length drama focussing on the people behind its creation."

The programme will be part of the BBC's Make it Digital initiative as an effort to generate interest in tech amongst youngsters.

Sid Meier's Starships shares one crucial theme with Civilization: Beyond Earth, the game whose story it loosely continues. Both titles hinge on a very simple idea, powerfully stated: the worst thing you're ever likely to find floating around out in space is another human being.

In many ways, Firaxis' latest offers even greater scope for our wretched species to express itself. Well, a greater stage, at any rate. Beyond Earth limited itself to the atrocities we might cause when scouting a new homeworld. Starships, however, throws open the entire galaxy. We're not finding out feet anymore. In fact, we've been granted wings. Cue gunship diplomacy. (Just me?)

Beyond that - and beyond a few themed unlockable treats - actual links between both games tend to be relatively cosmetic. Before you begin each match here, you choose from a familiar muddle of affinities and faction leaders, but they're all just starting perks, really, and while the game that lies beyond these choices is a turn-based affair, it's far breezier than Beyond Earth: a nice territory-capture strategy treat as you move between planets, a compact hex-based battler when you get into orbit around one.

A: Get real. I take active pleasure in the suffering of others, especially if that suffering is delivered at intimate proximity. If it boosts my social status, that's a bonus - but it's really all about the look on their stupid face as the idiots fail to understand how I could possibly be enjoying this.

Blizzard has unveiled the Blackrock Mountain Adventure for virtual card game Hearthstone.

Blackrock Mountain will be familiar to World of Warcraft players. It's the lair of Ragnaros, one of the iconic WOW bosses and a Legendary class card in Hearthstone.

The Blackrock Mountain Adventure includes a new board, five wings, 17 bosses and 31 new cards (five have been revealed). The first wing is Blackrock Depths, home to the Dark Iron dwarves - the first line of defense for Ragnaros. The second wing is The Molten Core.

Wizards of the Coast confirmed Magic Duels: Origins is free-to-play, mirroring the business model Blizzard uses for the phenomenally-successful Hearthstone, and will be released this July on Xbox One, PC via Steam and iPads.

Warner Bros. has announced Mortal Kombat X: Mobile, due out April for iOS and Android devices.

As you'd expect, it's a mobile version of NetherRealm's gory fighting game Mortal Kombat X. Unlike its big brother, however, Mortal Kombat X: Mobile is free-to-play and is described as a "fighting/card-battler hybrid".

The trailer, below, doesn't give away much, but we can see you need to swipe to "Finish Him", so there are Fatalities, card collecting and multiplayer.

Knights of Pen & Paper 2 will be released for PC, iOS and Android devices on 14th May.

It's a sequel to the quirky pixelated role-playing game we really really liked in 2013. You play a bunch of people playing as a group of fantasy heroes - a game within a game. That allows plenty of tongue-in-cheek pokes at the RPG genre.

The game itself was limited but the sequel is beefier. It's now 16-bit with overhauled combat, new crafting, dynamically generated dungeons and more races and classes too.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1740007Mon, 02 Mar 2015 14:24:00 +0000Watch indie games star in House of Cards season three

House of Cards' just-released third season features two new guest stars: iPad puzzler Monument Valley and PC adventure The Stanley Parable.

Kevin Spacey's character, the series' lead, US president Frank Underwood, has long been a fan of video games. But the new run of episodes sees Underwood try indie titles for the first time.

Monument Valley pops up early in the season and acts as something of a revelation for Underwood. It's featured in several scenes, as he plays the game and then reads colleagues a review.

The next Adventure for Hearthstone may be themed around World of Warcraft's Molten Core raid, according to information datamined from a patch on Blizzard's servers (thanks, Hearthpwn via MetaBomb).

The patch details three new cosmetic card backs for the game, although no card images are present in the files.

The most interesting of the three is called Molten Core, tagged as a reward for a license detection, and carrying a further note that it relates to the "purchase brm presale". BRM is likely an abbreviation for Blackrock Mountain, the WOW region where the Molten Core raid is set.

That's all very well, but for me the most interesting part of this news is that this will mark the very first time Telltale isn't working on a licensed franchise. So what does that mean for its next game?

Hello! Chris Donlan here. David Goldfarb, our regular columnist, is away this week, so I've asked Rob Fearon to write something instead and he has very kindly agreed. Rob designs wonderful arcade games such as DRM (which does not include DRM) and he is also a brilliant writer. I know: what a massive jerk. I really hope you enjoy what he's come up with today. Also, look at THIS.

I grew up in an all too typical 1980's northern town. Factories closed, unemployment rose. First friends of the family left jobless, then my parents. The stinking grey skies a reminder that the wheels of industry still turned close, the lack of food in the cupboard and the tears and upset a constant reminder of how out of reach most work in the area remained.

I got a Spectrum when I was younger, before the work and the money ran dry. I'd rush home from school to play Jetpac, Jet Set Willy, Jumping Jack and other games beginning with J. I loved playing games but I never felt like I could actually write the things. Sure, I'd tinker with The Quill to make hilarious (not actually hilarious) adventure games (for the kids that's what we'd now call "interactive fiction" or what a subset of idiots would call "not a game"), then there was HURG, GAC and SEUCK and other tools with awful acronyms designed to help make making games easier. In the main they were too limited or too difficult for me to use. Besides, I really liked playing games and making them seriously cuts into the time you can spend doing that, yeah?

Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile developer tri-Ace has been acquired by Japanese mobile company Nepro Japan.

Siliconera translated the announcement where it noted that the publisher hopes to develop more smartphone titles with the critically acclaimed console developer in its stable (along with another gaming subsidiary, Mobile & Game Studio).

While best known for the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile series, tri-Ace also collaborated with Square Enix on Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 13-2 where it assisted in game design, artwork, programming and other areas. It also developed the 2010 RPG Resonance of Fate, which our Simon Parkin recommended.

Rez and Child of Eden creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making an iOS and Android puzzle game called 18.

As detailed by Japanese mobile game consultancy firm Kantan Games, Inc. (via NeoGAF), this upcoming mobile puzzler is being published by Mobcast and is expected to launch worldwide in the next month or so. In fact, it's already accepting pre-registration in Japan.

According Kantan Games' report - based on an earning's call from Mobcast - 18 "will blend a story line, puzzle mechanics, and battle RPG elements."

If you haven't watched Mean Girls, the classic 2004 high school movie starring Lindsay Lohan, go and watch it right now. We'll wait. Did you see it? Boo, you whore, don't lie. Seriously, go and watch it now.

Deftly directed by Mark Waters (brother of Daniel, who similarly re-defined the high school movie by writing Heathers in the 80s), Mean Girls was a lightening rod for emerging talent in the early 00s. It kickstarted the careers of Tina Fey (30 Rock), Amy Pohler (Parks and Recreation), Rachel McAdams (Time Traveller's Wife), Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex), and Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia) to name but a few. Fey's sharp script really cut to the heart of the high school experience, a warzone where new girl Cady took on the school's reigning Queen Bees (known as 'The Plastics'), and destroyed them from within using sneaky guerrilla tactics that would make Solid Snake proud.

And now, just slightly too late to celebrate the movie's 10th anniversary, we have Mean Girls: The Game, an iOS puzzle game that attempts to pioneer the 'Tiara Defence' genre. Styling itself as a semi-sequel to the movie, each of the 20 levels sees you defending the Spring Fling tiara from a new generation of Plastics. You're not alone though, as you can enlist an army of burnouts, varsity jocks and foreign exchange students to take out the waves of Plastics before they reach the tiara goal. Defeat all the waves, and you'll unlock the next level and a series of challenges - but let more than 10 plastics grab a piece of the tiara, and your failure will earn you a mention in the Burn Book like the homeschooled jungle freak you are.

UPDATE 19/02/2015: We've got the first gameplay of Sonic Runners, the new Sonic mobile game.

The video, below, is Japanese, but we get a good look at what Sonic Runners will be like to play. We can also see Sonic's new, stockier design, at least compared to his look in the recent Sonic Boom games.

In Sonic Runners Sonic and his chums run automatically. You tap the screen to make him jump. It's due out in Japan in the spring.

Over the last 15 years, Eurogamer's parent company Gamer Network has launched a number of websites. Some, like Eurogamer and our US counterpart USGamer, are aimed squarely at consumers, while others like GamesIndustry.biz cater to industry interests. All of them share a common theme in covering the entire spectrum of gaming tastes.

There's a different sort of game though, and a different sort of audience, that can be hard for a generalist site to satisfy. League of Legends and DOTA 2 count their daily players in the millions, for example, while StarCraft 2's feverish following is well documented. There are plenty more besides, but one game in particular - Hearthstone - captured everyone's attention at Gamer Network last year.

Back in November, a few of us set about thinking how we could create an experimental website where we could share our passion for these sorts of games - and their constantly shifting metagames - exclusively and as spare time permits. The end result is a portal we call MetaBomb, and the game we're launching it with today is Hearthstone.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1737504Wed, 18 Feb 2015 13:55:00 +0000How a nasty tumble in China led to the birth of a new developer

How's this for a video game origin story? Around seven years ago, Mark Major, a New Zealand university student working in China, was crossing the road when the ground opened up and swallowed him.

"I was going down to get a bottle of water from the local convenience store," he tells me. "I was living on a very busy street in Beijing, full of restaurants and those lanterns they put out at night. I just went down to the store, and that was my last memory."

Major woke up in a hole, about nine metres deep. Situated right next to the convenience store, this hole had been covered in plastic - plastic that Beijing's acid rain had steadily eaten into. While Major has no memory of the fall itself - not even the crash through a piece of wood on the way down that slowed his descent and probably saved his life - he will never forget the hour that followed.

The long arm of Zenimax's lawyers has extended its reach yet again, this time slamming a cease-and-desist down on a mobile game that uses the word "Fallout" in its name.

Jordan Maron, aka CaptainSparklez, is a popular YouTube personality who has been working on Fortress Fallout, an iOS and Android free-to-download game in which you build a tower and then battle an opponent who has also built a tower. The first person to destroy their opponent's core is the winner.

In the video, below, Maron reveals a cease-and-desist letter sent by Zenimax that orders the name of the game be changed. Zenimax owns Bethesda, which owns the Fallout trademark and develops and publishes Fallout video games.

The story of how Peter Molyneux got his big break in the games industry is revealing. After his first game The Entrepreneur failed to sell, Molyneux gave up on games and started exporting baked beans to the Middle East. Soon afterwards Commodore, confusing Molyneux's company Taurus with a networking company called Torus, flew him to the States and mistakenly offered him ten brand-new Amigas.

"I remember it vividly going through my head," says Molyneux . "There was like an angel and a devil on my shoulder. One saying 'Go on you've got to tell the truth, you can't lie like this.' Then this other voice saying 'Just lie. Just lie, get the machines, and sort it out afterwards.' Of course, I ended up lying."

What would you have done? I like to think I'd have been a big enough man to come clean, but without being in that situation it's impossible to say.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1736659Fri, 13 Feb 2015 09:30:00 +0000How is the other new shooter from the creators of Halo?

Midnight Star isn't Halo on a tablet, but it plays a lot like it. You'll find yourself playing from a first-person view, shooting squat, comical aliens in the shadow of grand alien architecture, and you'll hear your efforts rewarded with shout-outs from a gruff American commentator: 'Double-kill', 'Triple-kill', 'Titanikill', 'Killzilla'.

More importantly, it's got the snap and fizz of Halo's arsenal transposed to a touchscreen - there's a tangible sense of weight as you drag the guns around the screen, a meaty boom when you pull the trigger of a shotgun and crunchy feedback when you headshot one of the bespectacled space-toads that serve as Midnight Star's grunts.

All of which makes perfect sense when you learn that Midnight Star is the debut game from Industrial Toys, a studio set up by Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie, and its design lead is Paul Bertone, someone who filled that same role on Halo 2 before becoming lead mission designer on Halo 3. This is a game with enviable heritage.